Historical Fashion in Detail: The 17th and 18th Centuries

This volume offers the opportunity to see fragile clothes in detail. Perfection is in the detail: decorative seams, exquisite stitching, knife sharp pleats and voluptuous drapery feature alongside more usual techniques such as stamping, pinking and slashing. Many of the skills displayed have been lost to the modern world: such labour-intensive handwork is no longer done and these effects cannot be replicated by machine. Yet many fashion designers take their inspiration from the past, adapting ideas to a more contemporary idiom.

Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey

The planet Pern has been colonized for centuries by humans. When humans first settled on this world, they did not take notice of its sister planet, which had an indigenous life form that attempted to land on Pern when it came within reach. These silver "threads" fell in a destructive wave on the temperate lands of Pern once every 200 years, destroying all life they encountered. To combat this menace, the inhabitants of Pern developed a species of dragon that could burn these threads out of the sky before they touched down.

Galileo and 400 Years of Telescopic Astronomy

In 1609 Galileo first used his telescope to kick start the science of observational astronomy - an event that proved to be of enormous historic, scientific, and cultural importance. Galileo and 400 Years of Telescopic Astronomy will feature the life and achievements of Galileo, around which has pivoted the story of four centuries of telescopic astronomy. The book will detail how astronomy has progressed through four centuries and contain glimpses of future space research and astronomy goals. 

Look to Windward by Iain Banksby Iain Banks

After a harrowing battle flashback, the scene shifts to one of the Culture's wonderfully landscaped, ring-shaped artificial worlds called Orbitals. A ghastly light is awaited in the sky from distant suns detonated in the war of Consider Phlebas eight centuries earlier; an occasion for sombre festivity, pyrotechnics, and a memorial symphony from exiled alien composer Ziller.

This one thousand year history of the civilization of western Europe has already been recognized in France as a scholarly contribution of the highest order and as a popular classic. Part one, Historical Evolution, is a narrative account of the entire period, from the barbarian settlement of Roman Europe in the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries to the war-torn crises of Christian Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries. Part two is analytical, concerned with the origins of early medieval ideas of culture and religion, the constraints of time and space in a pre-industrial world...